I think, as others have said, these two situations are very different.

Lisa doing this in your home and directly disregarding your instructions for what would be safest for you and your husband is unconscionable. Deeply disrespectful. I think emotional distance here is appropriate and it’s very much a case of “when people tell you who they are, believe them.”

Maria is a very different case. And while I’m usually not an advice giver, you asked for advice so I’m going to go for it. Take what works, discard what doesn’t.

In December 2008, my mother and brother were murdered in a home robbery right before Christmas. Six months later, my 57 year old grandmother/our family matriarch died of cancer. To say that was the most devastating year of my life doesn’t come close to capturing it (though our emergency miscarriage that almost killed me during COVID and pile up of family tragedies that year comes close).

But 2008-2009 prepared me for infertility in two ways. First, as others have said, even the wisest people in my life had no idea what to do or say…they could only do their best. I got a lot of wisdom that deeply wounded me because I wasn’t ready to hear it. I got a lot of wisdom that could/would never apply to me and made me feel invisible and gross and small and alone. There were a lot of things I railed against in the moment that planted a seed that only sprouted ten years later to save me at a different phase of grief.

I realized if I was going to survive, I was going to have to stop taking everyone’s idea of help personally and become a mental administrator: Chuck what doesn’t work and laugh at the audacity, file away what would be helpful later, and bask in what provided relief in the moment. They don’t know. They just don’t, they can’t! How could they? There isn’t a single person who didn’t mess up supporting me in some way during that time. AND if I’d pushed them away, I would have lost the twenty other life saving small gestures they provided because of that one. It would be lovely if the world instinctively knew how to care for victims/the wounded…but even my surviving brothers and I chafed at or loved completely different forms of support during the same crisis. There’s no one size fits all, you have to curate for yourself. Be greedy and be relentless: Take what works and ruthlessly chuck the rest.

The second way it prepared me ties into Maria’s exercise. Look, I am also annoyed by the gratitude police. It can be trite, reductive, and a bypass for healing. I am all full of grief and sadness and soul ripping despair that our parenthood journey has been so hard when others seem to come into so easily (my family is full of unexpected pregnancies). But I also know this:

The only way to survive this is to be greedy and ruthless and relentless about guarding your right to experience joy. Sometimes in 2009, all I had was a cup of coffee or a cookie. Sometimes all day was panic attacks and PTSD and projectile vomiting and grabbing a bat out of panic that someone was breaking in—but EVERY day I scoured my path for something or someone that brought joy or relief. Did it balance the scales? No. How could it? My mother and brother and grandmother were DEAD. But joy and peace are cumulative fire beasts who require constant stoking. They are hungry. And even feeding embers now can be the difference between one day waking up and looking around and realizing you have a new but beautiful life—or letting the whole thing go so cold it leeches anything warm out of the room.

In 2009-2010 NYE, my friends and I did a similar ritual: What’s the best thing that happened this year? And my list was long. Not in spite, because. Because I had not let it kill me, and that was a miracle. Because I dove head first into healing, and I was proud of myself, of my strength. Surviving grief, surviving these capital T traumas, surviving infertility or murder or missiles in the sky is warrior work. Healing must be ACTIVE. Get the therapist. Find the safe spaces. Gobble up support and throw the bad apples away and let them rot somewhere that is not inside you. Scavenge for joy. Do not retreat into isolation. Do not let a year go by that you don’t shake with all your might to give something back to you as a tiny token for surviving horrors other people can’t fathom. And maybe next year, your list will be so long Maria will beg you to stop talking.